The Beautiful Bald Head

Many remember Sinead O'Connor's infamous appearance on Saturday Night Live during which she ripped up a photo of the Pope. That performance inspired boycotts and stunts like the public destruction of her CDs by steamroller. Her career faltered, at least from a music industry standpoint, and she was often called "crazy." The truth is, however, she was angry about her own and others' childhood sexual abuse by priests, as well as the now-acknowledged crisis of cover-ups by church leadership. So if you ask us, all the people who called her crazy must now fuck off reassess, quickly and gracefully. She was 20 years ahead of her time, and it's hard to think of anything more justifiable to get mad about. O'Connor's latest CD is called Theology, which she says is not a "message" project, merely a desire to make music and find a little peace. The album's two versions, one acoustic and one with a full band, incorporate mostly new material: The single, "Something Beautiful," lives up to its name. It also builds on her weird but relatively well-received previous recording of reggae classics, Throw Down Your Arms. Theology gives us one of the world's best voices singing one of the world's best songs: "By the Rivers of Babylon."
Sun., Sept. 16, 8 p.m.